Call for 0.8.0.dev testers

[José Valim]

Hello everyone,

I am glad to say Elixir v0.8.0 is going to be released soon and I need your help to test it before the release.

As of now, Elixir's master branch is frozen, only bug fixes are going in.

This release contains many improvements, like tighter integration with Erlang applications, extend Unicode support, a faster HashDict implementation and improved hygiene in macros. We also have some deprecations which can be easily handled by searching and replacing the deprecated calls. You can read more about it all in the CHANGELOG:

https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

However, the reason I am doing this announcement, is because we also include one non backwards compatible change.

In order to provide more robust macros, we have slightly changed Elixir's AST. Previously quoting an expression would return:

    quote do: sum(1,2,3)

    #=> { :sum, 1, [1,2,3] }

But now, it returns:

    quote do: sum(1,2,3)

    #=> { :sum, [line: 1], [1,2,3] }

The second item in the tuple now no longer represents the line, but it is a list containing metadata about the node.

This means that, if you were previously generating syntax nodes, your code will no longer work. For example, if you manually generated a variable node as:

    { :x, 0, nil }

It now needs to be:

    { :x, [], nil }

Those changes were required to support hygiene in macros. You can read more about hygiene here:

https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/master/lib/elixir/lib/kernel/special_forms.ex#L323

I hope everyone have a great time and, if you have any issues while upgrading, please ping me on freenode or reply to this announcement.

Let's iron out the details to finally get this important release out!

Cheers!

José Valim

www.plataformatec.com.br

Skype: jv.ptec

Founder and Lead Developer

[José Valim]

A small correction. By "if you were previously generating syntax nodes", I mean generating syntax notes manually. If all of your nodes are generated via "quote", you are good to go.

José Valim

www.plataformatec.com.br

Skype: jv.ptec

Founder and Lead Developer

[Alex Zatvorskiy]

Some benchmark for novel 'HashDict' implementation

https://gist.github.com/4594017